A View From The Jeep: Saturday, March 9

A View From The Jeep: Saturday, March 9

This week CONNIE is conflicted over how she should be seen to react to ‘International Women’s Week’ …

Connie is conflicted over how she should be seen to react to ‘International Women’s Week’, it’s playing in her mind particularly as she has been invited to attend a Ladies Lunch for women in business. How she scored that invitation remains a mystery to her as most of her working life has been somewhere on the dodgy side of dodge. Normally a gala luncheon simply means two days of grooming prep, plus plenty of Prada and Oscar-worthy acting on the day itself, pretending to be nice whilst disguising thinly veiled condescension. A familiar routine in which Connie excels and revels, so she is rather puzzled to be suffering alien emotional anxiety as she deliberates over this particular invitation, especially as the event is in the not yet hackneyed Ivy on Dawson Street.

She sees herself as a stalwart feminist and she understands the need for quota targets and gets that specific and particular promotion of women is necessary if catch up or parity with the boys is ever to become a reality. Notwithstanding this, and admittedly it could be her well disguised age, but she simply can’t help harbour seeds of doubt regarding movements that underline the segregation of women in the corporate world, surely these days everyone is the same, or are we not all ‘theys’? She herself has never tolerated one teenie whiff of discrimination though she’s not beyond a bit of male manipulation and the odd eye lash flutter when it helps to achieve her goals.

Connie knows she is threading very menacing waters here and of course she dare not admit her contentious thoughts to anyone for fear of being totally hung out to dry. Ever pragmatic she sees the touchy situation quite prosaically: women leave the work force early to mind the children, usually because they have no access to affordable child care and therefore they just aren’t around to play the corporate snakes and ladder games, yet she fails to understand why they don’t all hire Filipinas like she did? After all there is very little a healthy overdraft won’t cure.

She will of course attend the lunch, but she instinctively feels these events are not only somewhat patronising to the participants but also run the danger of disaffecting others. Connie knows several women who feel their promotions have been devalued by being tinged with negative connotations of positive discrimination. But most of all, the dearth of flirting opportunities at these mono-sex events makes them exceedingly dull.